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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
John Updike -
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
John Updike -
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
John Updike -
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
John Updike -
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
John Updike -
Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.
John Updike -
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
John Updike
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Re Annabelle ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.
John Updike -
'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
John Updike -
Nelson, about Harry 'I saw him, eventually,' Nelson says, 'as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. ... But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way.'
John Updike -
'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
John Updike -
At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
John Updike -
'...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.'
John Updike
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
John Updike -
Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
John Updike -
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
John Updike -
Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
John Updike -
Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
John Updike -
Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
John Updike
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
John Updike -
about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
John Updike -
...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
John Updike -
Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.
John Updike